


Come Lay Down

by GaryTheFish



Series: Hope is a Four Letter Word [18]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 02:39:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7387261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GaryTheFish/pseuds/GaryTheFish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Come lay down at the edge<br/>Come lay down where the time's suspended<br/>Come lay down and hear the voices calling you<br/>From a northern sky</p><p>Your eyes are open and singing<br/>Your eyes are open and not quite breathing<br/>Your eyes are open seeing things that I can't see<br/>As hard as I try</p><p>Follow me and don't look down</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Lay Down

**Author's Note:**

> **Trigger Warning: Allusions to past non-con and torture. PTSD and all that comes with it.**
> 
> Please mind the warnings and be safe. <3
> 
> (also rated for The Swears.)

_Light fills the space around him, pale and sickly. It is never quite enough to chase the shadows from the corners of the room. He cannot turn his head far enough to see anything; bound at the neck, wrists and ankles, he can only stare above him at the blank ceiling and a few feet around him, but his ears are sharp. He is by himself for the moment, but that will not last. He closes his eyes and rests as best he can in the unnatural position, knowing he will need his strength for what lies ahead._

_The air shifts slightly; it is the only indication that he is no longer alone. Soft footsteps approach the table, bringing with them a hush of fabric and a scent that might be pleasant if not for the darker wisp of decaying stone that lingers beneath it._

_“And what’s the order of the day?” he asks into the expectant silence. He has spoken before he’d like to, but the quiet is unnerving him more than he’ll admit, and it has already been a difficult few days, to say the least. He can no longer feel his left hand, and his right leg is rapidly going numb from the pressure of the manacles. He cannot count the hours he has been here alone; he stopped trying weeks ago._

_The answering voice is laced with poison and honey. He can’t tell which he prefers. “I don’t know what you mean,” she says. Her fingers trail down his bare chest, nails like needles; they leave whisper-thin lines in his flesh that will bleed for days, and he smiles._

_“Ah,” he says, opening his eyes at last. “It’s to be that, then. Blissful humiliation. Excruciating pleasure. Ecstasy to make the stars themselves weep, and I’m but a god, writhing in agony as I scream for mercy and beg for more, all in the same wasted breath. You’ll forgive me if I don’t last long. It’s been quite a while since he’s sent one like you.”_

_She is faceless, an illusion like all the others, limbs made of shadows and brimstone. Fell light flickers beneath her skin as she traces her finger lovingly down his cheek; he feels the first drops of blood slip into his ear. There is a strange grace in her motions as she repeats the gesture. A second gash joins the first, then a third, but he does not react. A gentle brush of her fingers against his lips; he feels them shred and turns his head as best he can to keep the blood from draining down his throat._

_“Loki.” Her voice is chiding and patient._

_“How charming,” he replies coldly, spraying blood onto the thin fabric covering her breasts with a wolfish grin. “He’s bothered to tell you my name.”_

_“Loki.” She is more insistent as she leans forward, and she cannot, she cannot be this foolish, for they are all the same in the end, but then her hand comes in contact with the metal stretched too tight across his neck. He surges upward, skin charring as his bonds melt beneath the fire in her touch. Their positions are reversed in less than a breath; he throws her to the wall, stumbling away toward the workbench. His fingers scramble at the shadowed surface, scooping up the first weapon he finds, and he whirls back to face her, metal jagged in his fist._

_***_

She’d forgotten how fast he was, how there was little to no warning even in their training sessions. Aeslin threw out her arm, calling the power to her and _pushing_ herself away from the window, which blew outward across the deck in response ( _what_ **_will_ ** _the neighbors think_ ). A jolt of pain lanced through her head as she slammed to the couch cushions he’d so spectacularly vacated seconds before, dimming her vision for a dangerous moment, and she shoved the magic back behind its door as rapidly as she could. The pain eased enough to allow her to push up, one hand to her head, just in time to duck as he whipped the bowl that held her keys toward her. It sailed through the blasted-out window, shattering on the deck railing in a cheerful hail of white and green.

“Loki,” she said. “ _Loki_.”

He stopped a few steps away, hand casually resting at his side, and her blood froze at the sight of the keys clenched in his fist. _Death by decorative trowel_ , she thought a little hysterically. _So that’s how it goes._ He took a single step toward her, and she mentally crossed her fingers.

“ _Elskan_ ,” she said, carefully coming to a sitting position. “Don-”

“Shut up,” he hissed back, but a faint shiver went through him. “You’re an illusion. Just like all the others.” The metal tangled in his hand clinked as he studied her. “Not real. That doesn’t mean you won’t bleed. Shall we try it and see?”

“I’m real,” Aeslin told him, hands coming up placatingly. “I swear.”

A laugh, cold and vicious. “Then _prove_ it, bitch.”

The word hit her like a slap, but she took a deep breath and kept her voice even. “We went on a haunted tour of Jacksonville. We only made it halfway through before we realized that between the two of us, we've already got enough ghosts for several lifetimes, so we ducked out, had breakfast at one in the morning and drove until after sunrise.”

His eyes narrowed a fraction, his voice still sharp as knives. “Again.”

“You got tamales from a roadside stand outside Odessa. You’d barely made it to the second bite before you asked that beautiful old woman to marry you. She said she was already taken, but not to lose her number. I don’t think she’d blushed that much in years.”

“Again.” None of the rage had gone, but there was a softness in his jaw that hadn’t been there before.

“We went to a bar in Nashville and you learned what harmonicas and cover bands are. You hijacked my music player and listened to _The Joshua Tree_ eleven times back to back before you got it out of your system.”

He closed his eyes, breath moving rapidly through his nose. “Again.”

“You can’t win a round of Magic to save your life unless I let you cheat, which I do every time, and even then it doesn’t always help.”

The keys fell from his hand with a thud of metal against wood. “Again.”

“You bought me a prism in a rock shop outside Flagstaff and used it to make rainbows on my face while I drove and you complained that they were missing all the _good_ colors. It’s hanging on my easel if you’d like to go see it. And Loki…” she lowered her hands gently. “You did all those things after he was dead. After he was nothing but ashes. I swear to you. This is real. All of it.”

His shoulders slumped, and though he clenched his fists, she could see his hands shaking. He took a stumbling step toward her, then another, and then, with a harsh, wordless noise, he fell to his knees with his head in her lap.

***

_-Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.-_

_He clings to her like a drowning man, digging bruises into her legs that he will never be able to kiss away as his sobs tear him apart. He feels her fingers combing through his hair, stroking and dragging along his scalp, and where there should be agony, there is only strength flowing from her hands, seeping into the cracks of his soul. He is ashamed to take what she needs so desperately herself, ashamed to draw from a well almost dry, but he can no longer help himself. He has been empty too long; she has been the only thing to fill him, to push back the tides that threaten to overwhelm him, and he has almost killed her. Ended her in a way that is so vivid, so clear even now that he is surprised he does not smell blood, drenched in it as they both should be. Yet she caresses him, no fear in her touch, and his sobs come harder, more violent than before._

_“What can I do?” she asks, her fingers twisting helplessly in the sweat-drenched curls on his neck, and he pulls closer, a limpet against the waves. “Tell me what to do.”_

take me break me fuck me til i can’t remember what i’ve seen what i’ve been what i’ve done oh gods what have i done

_He bites the inside of his lip until at last he tastes the blood he has expected, but he cannot stop his keening long enough to put two words together. Instead, he pours his heart onto her battered jeans, tears and blood mingling in the worn fabric beneath his face until at last he is able to speak a single word._

_“Stay.”_

_“I will.”_

_He cannot face her yet. He raises his head, numbly addressing the hole at the knee of her jeans._

_“Don’t go,” he says, feeling like a child. “Don’t go. Ever. Please. I need you.”_

_He knows what she will say, he thinks, and he is surprised when he is wrong._

_“I won't,” she tells him, fingers still threading through his hair, and he lets himself believe her because in this moment, he cannot bear otherwise. “Come here.”_

_The wind comes through the empty window, and he wonders when that happened, but he does not resist when she helps him to the couch. She makes to climb behind him, and he stops her._

_“I need to see you,” he winces at the pleading in his voice. “I need to see your face. To hear you. To hold you. Please.”_

_He pushes back as far as he can into the deep cushions, and she slips into his arms as though made for them. He strokes the sharp lines of her chin, the feather of her brows, ghosting over lashes and cheekbones with his fingers. After a long moment, she turns to her back and he rests his head on her chest, his cheek rising and falling with her even breaths and her heartbeat strong in his ear._

_It is hours before he can move more than an arm’s length away; he follows her through the kitchen, always a half-step behind as she makes coffee for both of them, knowing that neither one of them will sleep tonight. He wraps his hands around the mug. The words are halting at first, a trickle that becomes a torrent; his levees wash away in seconds, walls dissolving like mud, and perhaps this is how it should have been all along._

_Dawn has broken before he finishes, the last of his words draining roughly away like sand from an hourglass. Her face is white; the night has not gone gently for either of them. The living room is cold and smells heavily of the sea, and the curtains sway in the grey light as she leads him to the library. They push together floor cushions and blankets; he curls next to her, his face buried in her neck, and he feels her press a kiss to his hair in the last moment before he falls into an exhausted sleep._

 

**Author's Note:**

> i've been asked quite a few times when loki was going to break, so here you have it. this is as far down as he's going, or at least as far down as i'm going to show, because due to my own history, this was extremely difficult to write. (but i did the thing. so there, brain.) there will be additional angst, i'm sure, but nothing like this. 
> 
> beta read by the awes-mazing MaliceManaged and the fabulous rottenlittleboys (who, along with LokiSpeaks, is largely responsible for triggering the ideas that brought this into being. thank you, and i do mean that in a good way.) <3
> 
> Title and lyric from "Come Lay Down" by Howie Day.


End file.
